


All at the Wrong (Right) Time

by Anonymous



Category: Tiger & Bunny
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-25 15:58:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12039303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: In which Tiger doesn't go home when brooding on his Hundred Power, and Kaede comes into her powers as a result of fearing for her grandmother. Instead of the emergence of Kaede's NEXT power causing father and daughter to bond, a rift is formed.But not without new opportunities, and new friendships.NB: Kaede is also older in this story than in the canon timeline.





	All at the Wrong (Right) Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starianprincess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starianprincess/gifts).



> For starianprincess' prompt 'Kaede enrols at the Academy and Ivan is her teacher'. I had fun thinking about how this might come about, and I hope you enjoy, dear recipient.

When Kaede was twelve, she wanted to be a figure skater.

When Kaede was thirteen, she wanted to be a researcher in agricultural science.

When Kaede was fourteen, she wanted to be an interpreter.

When Kaede was fifteen, she wanted to be a theatrical costume designer.

When Kaede was sixteen, all she wanted to be was normal: a normal girl with a normal family. It was all she'd wanted to be when she was eleven, too, and it was exactly as impossible at sixteen as it had been then.

Eleven had been worse, of course. It didn't hurt as much now, but the knowledge of how much it _had_ hurt didn't go away. The year Kaede had been eleven, she'd lived half at home and half at the hospital, reading books with her mother in chairs that dug into the backs of her knees, unable to lean over and cuddle against Tomoe's side because the IV pole got in the way. She'd believed unshakeably that something would happen to save her mother, and by the time she realized that it wouldn't, that her time with her mother was running out, it felt like running out of air.

"I'll always be here for you," her dad promised her, kneeling down and holding both her hands so she knew just how seriously he meant it - and she promised the same to him. 

But then _here_ turned into _there_. Kaede's grandmother took her to live with her in Oriental Town, and Kaede's dad stayed in Stern Bild. It wasn't so bad. When she called her dad up, a huge smile spread across her face and she couldn't help smiling too, no matter how miserable she felt.

But _here_ "in spirit" wasn't the same as the kind of here that let him hug her and take her out for ice cream. And, more and more, the older she got, _always_ felt like it was losing its meaning, too. She'd ring and he wouldn't answer, even during the times he'd said he'd be home, or she'd leave a message and he'd take days to reply. And over time, the _not-here_ and _not-always_ seemed to blur together, so that even when his face appeared on the screen, she sometimes felt as though she was talking to someone in a different time or place, and when he looked at her, he saw a person who wasn't there at all.

Maybe that wasn't true for all of Kaede's adolescence, but the day that Anju fell and broke her hip, and Kaede's NEXT powers chose to awaken in the most terribly _useless_ panic response ever, when she thought of her Dad, all she could think was that he _wasn't_ here. That he _hadn't_ been.

So when Kaede's grandmother was home and settled again (as nothing else was), and when Uncle Muramasa, calling Kaede's dad for the third time that week, began to say, "And there's something else," Kaede caught his eyes and frantically gestured "no".

Uncle Muramasa paused and stared at her. He didn't put Kaede's dad on hold to ask Kaede what the problem was. His expression asked for him. Outside of the frame that Kaede's dad would be able to see, Kaede shook her head at her uncle and mouthed, _Don't tell him_.

"What is it?" Kaede's dad asked.

Uncle Muramasa, in a level tone of voice, began to explain something about what the doctor had said, ending it with a dry suggestion that even though it wasn't an emergency after all, Kaede's dad should come home and see the family.

"I know," Kaede's dad said, sounding sad, and then he changed the subject.

Uncle Muramasa hadn't expected Kaede's dad to agree - he had suggested that as a distraction, Kaede realized. And it had worked.

Which was fine. It was what she wanted. She and her grandmother and uncle could figure this out on their own. They were just _fine_ without Kaede's dad. He would just make everything worse.

It was harder to stay convinced of this two days later, when getting upset to the point of glowing blue made her hair grow and grow and grow (and it didn't shrink back again when she managed to calm down). It was very hard to stay convinced of this after a sports game at school, when suddenly everything metal flew towards her, and she _broke_ things.

She asked her grandmother to move the phone so that the destructive results of Kaede's powers weren't visible when Kaede's dad called.

"Kaede," her grandmother said, in the tone that meant she was both worried and disappointed, "I don't understand why you don't want us to tell Kotetsu that you're a NEXT. I've told you he's a NEXT too."

Privately, Kaede doubted that her father being a NEXT would mean he understood. Everyone said her powers were a real handful. If Dad had ever had this hard a time, surely she'd have heard more about it by now. Her grandmother had so many other stories about her Dad growing up. And most NEXTs could just do little, weird things, like making their voices echo or turning their bones flexible or getting a lot of information through smell.

"I do want to tell Dad eventually," she said. "Just... when it's more under control."

She almost explained it to Uncle Muramasa. She almost blurted out all of her confused feelings: that she wanted to be able to tell Kotetsu, later, that something _really big_ had happened and he hadn't been around to see. She didn't want to give him the chance to come and see her because this time (unlike all the other times?), she needed him; she didn't want to give him the chance to fail to come. But she didn't vent it all out to Uncle Muramasa because if she had, she might not have held firm. Maybe it was a petty thing to want and a silly thing to be stubborn about, but when she was eleven, she hadn't had _any_ choices to make about how her world would turn upside down, and now, at sixteen, she had a few.

The problem was, she was _really_ struggling with her powers.

After a week in which she barely touched everyone (which made her tense and jumpy all the time) she brushed against a couple of people in one of the town stores, and one of them (or maybe someone else she hadn't noticed? It was really hard to keep track) had a power that flat-out exhausted her. It seemed to do with walking or running - she kept taking steps that turned into giant steps, and it was nice for running home, but once she was home, she almost kicked holes in the walls. She burst into tears and _crawled_ to her room, and then felt bad for making her grandmother get her crutches and come after her, and crawled back to explain, through tears.

When she'd calmed down, her grandmother said, "Your uncle and I have been thinking."

"Oh?"

"I know you love your school, Kaede," Kaede's grandmother said, "but I don't think it's helping you with your powers."

It was true; the worry about coming into contact with someone with unknown NEXT powers distracted Kaede all day. School was where her friends were, but even some of her friends had been reacting badly to a Kaede who snapped occasionally and acted as weird as she'd been acting, and had a cloud hanging over her. (Only sometimes literally.) And then there was Mariko, whose mother was scared of NEXTs. Mariko had promised _she_ wasn't, but Kaede wondered if Mariko's mother knew that they still ate lunch together.

"Am I going to have to stay home?" Kaede asked.

"No," Kaede's grandmother said. "I think you should go to to Hero Academy."

"But that's in Stern Bild!" Kaede blurted out. 

"Yes, it is," Kaede's grandmother said.

"But...." Kaede said, and trailed off. She'd only been to Stern Bild a handful of times since she was eleven. Maybe not even as often as once a year. Sometimes she'd imagined moving there for a career, but that had felt as though it belonged to a very distant future, only theoretically connected to the present.

"Would I stay with my dad?"

Her grandmother sighed. "I think he'd like that very much," (tactfully omitting whether Kaede would), "but his apartment isn't close to the Academy, and they have boarding arrangements."

"Then I can keep it secret? Just a little longer?" Kaede pleaded.

Her grandmother's sigh was especially heavy.

"Just until I graduate from Hero Academy," Kaede stressed. "We'll tell Dad then."

"Kaede, I don't like this," her grandmother said, and then, unexpectedly, she gave in. "I think your father would be the first person to agree that everyone has the right to some secrets," she said. Kaede wanted to ask further, but she had what she wanted, and she didn't dare put it in jeopardy.

It turned out to be a good thing that Kaede was able to live at the Academy. For the late winter and spring months, she had two different streams of schoolwork to balance - material for the national end-of-year tests, so she could complete an ordinary year of schooling, and the material for Hero Academy.

Hero Academy didn't run to the same timetable as most schools. Some of their students - especially those whose NEXT powers had awoken when they were very young - followed an ordinary schedule. But many, like Kaede, had come to the school for short courses soon after their powers had awoken. There were children in Kaede's classes as young as ten, and adults older than Kaede's dad.

Classes covered managing stress, the history of NEXTs, and the right and wrong of using one's powers. One of Kaede's classmates, a Stern Bild boy only a little older than Kaede, told Kaede that Hero Academy had been set up to make ordinary people feel safe. "People like us used to get a choice," he said. "Go to NEXT school or go to prison!" Kaede wasn't sure she believed him. But their instructors were very serious about what happened to NEXTs who used their powers to hurt people and commit crime.

It wasn't the students' only exposure to those ideas, of course. All of Hero Academy watched Hero TV. It was one of the unexpected, nice things about Hero Academy. Kaede had always loved Hero TV, but she'd watched it on and off during her adolescence depending on other extracurricular pursuits and what her friends liked. Here, apart from a few disaffected students who scoffed at Hero TV as part of scoffing at everything the Academy represented, everyone had a favourite Hero and everyone could rattle off that Hero's most dramatic chases, rescues, and other feats.

Even Sandeep, the boy who'd told Kaede that Hero Academy had evolved from being an institute to make NEXTs "safe" for other humans, had a favourite Hero, even though his was long retired - a contemporary of Mr Legend's.

Every week, Kaede called her dad from her personal phone, and when he called the house in Oriental Town, Kaede's grandmother told him that Kaede was studying with her friends. It wasn't even a lie, although some of the students at Hero Academy strained the definition of "friends". Kaede was kind of average, academically, but her Hero Academy lessons as well as studying for the spring tests would have been a challenge for anyone.

Then she went back to Oriental Town to sit the tests for the end of the year, and then it was back to Hero Academy, and it was far emptier than it had been before. Hero TV was over for the season, and without it, a sense of community seemed to have disappeared.

No matter how stressed out Kaede got, though, she could tell she was getting better at her powers. She practiced until she could summon up a blue glow and then make it disappear before whatever power she had even started to manifest. And she was slowly learning to do all kinds of things with the powers she borrowed. There was a power to flatten her body to the thickness of a pebble (it felt _weird_ , but she could slide through cracks now). There was a power to puff out smoke like a salamander. There was a power to grow webs between her fingers (pointless, she thought, but at least she could make them come and go at will).

In the first few weeks she'd been at Hero Academy, there'd been a subtle game to throw her off by passing powers on to her; as she'd gained confidence in turning on and off her powers, her ability had instead given troublemaking students pause. What if the last person she'd touched had had super-strength, or the ability to make other people hear constant whispers?

There were a few students - not entirely overlapping with students who were her friends - whose powers she most liked to "borrow". Nina could make herself fall asleep at any time, and choose when to wake up, too. Tania could align very light things - blades of grass, or dust, or stray threads - to point north. 

And Ivan could take on anyone's face he wanted.

Ivan was one of a handful of tutors who appeared at the school after the spring tests. Almost everyone at Hero Academy was someone like Kaede - a NEXT who had recently had to grapple with their powers - and so the schedule of classes was rearranged to reflect this. There was a Biology elective, which Kaede skipped after another student told her it was a lot of theories about NEXT power no one had proven, and when she'd scratched off a few more that didn't interest her, most of the remaining classes had to do with acting as a Hero. Ivan took a lot of those.

There were classes on working with the police and other first responders, on de-escalating conflict, and on hand-to-hand combat. There were classes on how to get in (!!) and out of a burning building, and what not to do around a downed power line. 

Ivan took everything very seriously. He wasn't the best teacher at Hero Academy, but a lot of the other students treated him with a strange mix of familiarity and awe. When Kaede asked about it, she got shrugs and coy looks. It was, apparently, one of those things no one would tell you unless you already, somehow, knew.

Despite this catch-22, the one thing that Kaede was able to learn was Ivan's power, that he could shapeshift into other people or even, briefly, take on the appearance of objects. That was one of the best powers she'd imagined, especially now that she had time, and permission, to leave the Academy for hours at a time and explore Stern Bild.

Every time she'd thought about it before, she'd imagined running into her father. She'd imagined a flurry of excuses, and maybe, in her embarrassment, doing something really dumb with her powers.

But if she borrowed Ivan's power, she could meet a cry of "Kaede? Is that really you?" with a quick, subtle, use of her powers - Ivan's power, according to rumour, didn't even give off the tell-tale glow - and when she turned around to look at her father, he wouldn't see her. Just a stranger who looked a little bit like his daughter.

(Wasn't that what he saw already?)

(She told herself that she was being far too dramatic. Unfair.)

She'd become adept at brushing past people deliberately and then disappearing behind others before they turned around, and also at making contact subtly, so they didn't even realise she'd acquired their power. With Ivan, it was easy to do, the first couple of times. He taught hand-to-hand combat, and although Hero Academy had equipped her with gloves and other clothes that (mostly) blocked the transfer of power, that only worked when she wanted it to, and didn't push her sleeve up slightly at the wrong moment.

And then she could go into the city with her friends, without worrying about what she was going to tell her father about all these months of deception, and without feeling eyes on her back.

It was almost a game, borrowing Ivan's power. It required calculation and careful timing, and diverting attention away from herself. Each time she ducked past him in a doorway, her heart raced, and she was hyperaware of the exact distance between them. It felt a little like some of the crushes she'd had in the past. Maybe it even looked like one, too. Except, how embarrassing to have a crush on a tutor.

The sixth time she borrowed Ivan's power to go out, she wasn't as subtle as usual, but though he glanced at her, he didn't otherwise seem to react.

Feeling daring in general, and daring because she'd gotten away with it, she took a sky train close to where she'd grown up. She was looking for a park where she and Tomoe and Kotetsu had used to go and feed birds. She got lost several times, and discouraged. At one point she wondered if she even wanted to find it - or maybe if she'd passed it already, and hadn't recognized it - but she pushed on. She found it - a tiny square with a line of trees at its back, the fountain she remembered replaced by an ugly, bright red sculpture. When she closed her eyes she could remember running a hand through the fountain, the other hand clasping her mother's firmly, but both of her hands were empty when she opened her eyes.

If she'd told her father about her powers, about coming to Hero Academy, they could have come here together, and instead of trying to piece the memories together herself, she could have been listening to him tell her about a dozen separate occasions when she and he and Tomoe had been here.

He hadn't run out of stories, she knew. Her father's memories of her mother were one of the things she had treasured throughout her adolescence, even when it frustrated her that his memories of her as his cute little girl had overlaid the young woman she was becoming.

Kaede had come to Hero Academy to learn how to manage her powers, and despite accomplishing that, she was somehow less sure of herself than she'd ever been.

The next day in class, when Ivan came in, his eyes caught hers for a long moment, and she abruptly remembered that she might have give her game away. She looked down; she knew she was blushing. 

Despite having second thoughts about the charade she was carrying on with her father, Kaede still didn't want him to unexpectedly see her on the streets of Stern Bild. But, embarrassed at her earlier blushes, Kaede decided to take a different approach, one that better suited a Kaede who was rethinking her choices and making better ones. She asked to speak to Ivan after class, and then asked his permission to borrow his power.

Ivan was intense about everything. "Why?" he asked, not suspicious, but very serious, and the stories that Kaede had been making up unravelled in her head.

"There's someone I want to avoid," she said clumsily. 

Now Ivan's strange indigo eyes bored into hers. His normal intensity was nothing to this. "Kaede, is there someone who is making you feel unsafe?"

"No!" Kaede sputtered, horrified at the thought of making Ivan think she was avoiding a stalker. "It's no one dangerous - it's just embarrassing." She dreaded him asking her for more - which he clearly wanted to do. He clearly was worried for her.

But he seemed to accept this. "I hope I don't need to tell you," Ivan said, "but there are a lot of unethical things someone could do with my powers. I need to trust you not to use them to deceive anyone. Can I trust you, Kaede?"

Kaede's heart hammered. "Yes," she said.

"Very well, then," Ivan said, and held out his hand palm up. Shakily, Kaede laid her hand on his, then snatched it away again, feeling as though she'd been given an electric shock.

"Thank you," she said, and fled.

Outside the classroom, nearly at her dorm room, she had to stop and flop down on the grass and laugh. She almost could have cried, if that would have let out the nervous tension. She was a little giddy. She shifted her face to Ivan's, because she could, and back again. She giggled, sounding silly even to herself. She felt dizzy, and as if her skin was prickling all over. A thought flickered through her mind, as light and fleeting and ticklish as the butterflies in her stomach: that this was what it was like to fall in love.


End file.
